Authors: Suketu Mehta
“What about the censors?” I ask, remembering Vinod’s concerns about making a controversial film.
“Don’t worry about the censors,” Bacchan swats them away in the air, like houseflies. He relates what happened at the National Defense Academy, where his latest film,
Major Saab
, is set, in which he plays the academy commander. When he showed the film to some army officers, they had complained that certain scenes were not true to life and implied
that they could make trouble with the censors. “Ban it, I said to them, and I’ll make a film about what
really
goes on in the army: the gunrunning in the forward posts, the senior officers sleeping with the junior officers’ wives.” The officers backed down and said, Let’s talk about this over some drinks. Amitabh Bacchan had won a true hero’s victory; he took on the army single-handed, and the army gave in. I feel a glow within.
Vinod paces about his terrace after the meeting with Bacchan. He asks me what I think of Bacchan’s suggestions. I tell him I’m not sure the public will accept a movie in which both leads die. The basic difference between an art film and a commercial film is that in an art film the hero dies at the end. Vinod wants the militant to be reunited with his girlfriend and with his father at the conclusion of the film. So he rehearses the appeal he will make to Bacchan: “Sir, the system may be screwing the common man. But if I kill both my stars at the end of the picture, the system will surely screw me.”
What accounts for the star’s paranoia? Bacchan’s foray into politics came to a humiliating end; he was forced to resign his parliamentary seat in 1988, after his name was linked to the Bofors arms scandals. His entertainment conglomerate, ABCL, is on the front pages of the newspapers; his bank wants to sell his house to recover money loaned to the company. His movies are failing left and right. The whole country had loved him; the whole country had been ready to give its blood for him. It couldn’t be the people who had withdrawn their love. It couldn’t be that they were faithless. No, it had to be something else. It had to be the system.
W
E GO BACK
to Bacchan’s house late one night with the latest draft of the script. Jaya Bacchan, his wife, is there, along with his actor son, Abhishek, and the family accountant. Jaya is a dignified, gracious lady. I can still see the actress that delighted me in
Guddi
and
Mili.
Some snacks are offered to us in the living room. We talk about the Starr report, which is just out. The recent bombings of American embassies in East Africa, Bacchan now sees, were a plot to distract attention from Clinton’s troubles with Miss Lewinsky. I sense the dread hand of the system again.
We are discussing all this at three in the morning. Then we say good night to Jaya and go upstairs with the star to his study. Bacchan watches the location shots Vinod has taken in Kashmir. They show a gorgeous, peaceful country, with old bungalows and cascading fountains in well-laid-out
gardens. He makes approving noises about the revised script; I sense he is dog-tired and just wants to get the meeting over with. When we come down, it is about 4 a.m. Jaya is still there, at the foot of the stairs, in the low lights, gliding silently over the carpeted floor. Abhishek and the accountant also appear out of the shadows. We tell Jaya we thought she was turning in. “I’m always up till at least four-thirty,” she responds.
“We’re a family of insomniacs,” Abhishek explains, with no little pride.
Bacchan sits down again in front of the ever-present salted snacks, this time complemented by a dish of Rajasthani sweets. They all seem quite prepared to talk for another hour. We take our leave. The ghosts stay on.
S
HAHRUKH
K
HAN
,
OUR FIRST CHOICE
to play Altaaf the militant, comes to Vinod’s house one day to talk about the script. He is not good-looking in the conventional way but is bright, focused, and energetic. He comes wearing a black shirt with all the buttons undone down his hairless chest, blue jeans of which the too-long cuffs are not folded but ripped at the seams, and sneakers. I’ve met Shahrukh before; the first time was on the set of
Dil To Pagal Hai.
A shot was being filmed when the hero is meeting the heroine. She is shopping for vegetables, haggling over the price of a watermelon. Shahrukh comes to her aid; he puts his arm around the vegetable seller, a dark fellow with a huge mustache, and talks to him in a low voice. The vegetable seller looks chastened and puts the watermelon into a plastic bag. In the films I grew up with, heroes saved heroines from brigands; now they negotiate better prices on vegetables.
As Shahrukh enters Vinod’s living room, we are talking to Ajay, who has dropped in for lunch. The star is highly deferential toward the cop; Ajay once saved him from the gangs when he was targeted for extortion. Vinod’s servant, Khem, is not in the kitchen, and Anu says she will make tea. Shahrukh sees that we are not finished talking to Ajay. He gets up—“I’ll make tea; I make very good tea”—and disappears into the kitchen.
Then the servant comes up the stairs. “If Khem goes into the kitchen he’ll have a heart attack,” notes Vinod. Khem goes in and sees somebody pounding cardamom for tea. He is irritated, we find out later, that some interloper, maybe another servant, is doing his job. It is not until Shahrukh
comes out with the tea on a tray and Khem notices our attitude to him that he realizes who the man in his kitchen was. Stardom is not intrinsic; stars acquire their light through reflection, on the faces of their fans. At the moment, Shahrukh is the biggest star, in the country and in the region. Two Pakistani boys were recently caught by Indian soldiers as they illegally crossed the border in Kashmir. It turned out that they hadn’t crossed to join the jihad; they had braved death at the border in order to see their idol in the flesh. They had planned to travel to Bombay to see Shahrukh Khan.
Next on the list of Vinod’s decisions is the choice of the heroine. But it’s not very important. In an action film, the heroine is only slightly more important than the scenery. Vinod has already spoken to Tabu, who is a fine actress but, as a distributor advises him, “you should go for the glamour.” Preity Zinta, the actress I had met in Madanpura for Tanuja’s shoot, has a bubbly smile. Plus she’s from Himachal Pradesh. She is a pahari, a mountain girl. She gets the role of Sufi, the love interest.
Vinod chooses an old friend of his, Jackie Shroff, for the role of the villain. I knew about him and his friends when I came back for visits to Bombay. They hung around Wonderworld, the video-game parlor on Nepean Sea Road, and got the girls. Jackie, unlike most other Hindi film stars, makes eye contact with you when he talks. He is a big man, running to fat; when he eats Vinod’s biscuits, his assistant reprimands him. Vinod and Jackie—Jaggu to his friends—have an easy, affectionate, joking relationship. They’ve been through some times together. At one point, Vinod says, Jackie owed him five lakhs. He gave him twenty-two checks. All of them bounced.
Unlike the Hindi movies I grew up watching, in our film there is no vamp playing opposite the villain. Why aren’t there any vamps in Bollywood anymore? I ask Tanuja. “The heroine became the vamp,” she explains. In the glory days of Bindu and Helen, the vamps were the only screen women who were allowed to wear shocking costumes, gyrate erotically, drink whiskey. All that can now be done by the heroine; at least one song number where the woman who is later the dutiful wife seduces the hero by flashing her thighs is obligatory in today’s movies. Another role to be swallowed up by the lead is the comedy routine: Asrani, Paintal, Johnny Walker, the sidekick or fool who used to throw in a few accidental punches
in the climactic fight sequence. Bacchan destroyed the comedy roles; he incorporated them into his own. He was the only actor with enough stature to be able to do that and still look heroic.
T
HE PROPORTION
of popular movies that deal with political issues, with terrorists, has been steadily growing. I can hardly recall any when I lived here as a child. India now deals with threats to its integrity through the movies. Many of the Hindi films of recent days are about a vast international conspiracy against the country, headed by a villain of vague ethnic outlines. There are scenes of bombings, terrorists, usually in league with Gandhi cap—wearing politicians. It is a simple explanation for the million mutinies: It’s all coming from outside, what governments since independence have called the Foreign Hand. If we could only get to the one man who wants to destroy our country, everything would be all right. Somewhere in Pakistan, in Switzerland, sits Mogambo in his fabulous mansion, plotting with his minions ways to break up Hindustan.
I feel distanced from many of the scenes in
Mission Kashmir.
In writing them, I am a lawyer, putting words I do not believe in the mouths of my characters. Politically, I am at left angles to the film. I argue that we need to insert something about the social and economic conditions that go into the making of a terrorist, especially in Kashmir. I talk about visiting Kashmir in 1987 and seeing perhaps the most corrupt state government in India; about the wishes of most of the locals I had spoken to not to be part of the Indian Union; about the double standard in India’s keeping Muslim-majority Kashmir on the grounds that the maharajah had acceded to us at independence, and refusing to let the Muslim princes of Hyderabad and Junagadh accede to Pakistan because they ruled over Hindu-majority states. But I don’t push the point. I do not have the necessary weight on the script-writing team.
Vinod wants the film to reinforce in the popular imagination the syncretic idea of Kashmiryat, the age-old ideology that allows Muslims at the Hazratbal mosque and Hindus at the Shankaracharya temple to worship in the same country. He is not blind to the recent history of his troubled homeland. At one point, he says, “The Indians have fucked Kashmir. I’m a Kashmiri, I know. They’ve been fucking Kashmir for fifty years.” The script presents a full panoply of the political views of the country’s Muslims,
represented by Khan, the pro—Indian state Muslim, to Altaaf the duped Muslim terrorist, to Hilal the troublemaking fanatic from Afghanistan. At one point, a Hindu bureaucrat questions Khan’s loyalty. Khan responds angrily. “Mr. Deshpande, it is not the misfortune only of the Muslims but that of the entire country that a soldier who has braved bullets for twenty-one years must prove his loyalty repeatedly because his name is not Deshpande but Inayat Khan. . . . My love for this country needs no certificates from a bureaucrat.”
The script also keeps making halfhearted attempts to balance the view of the Indian state with that of the Kashmiris. But it is always tempered, always compromised. In one of the scenes, a terrorist explains his reasons for joining the movement. “First they shamed my mother. I picked up a gun and came here.” This brave statement is quickly balanced by his next sentence, which he says while holding a letter from home. “Now across the border they have done the same with my sister.” In all things, equivalence. Equivalence can freeze the censor’s scissor in mid snip. Equivalence can stop the terrorist’s bullet half an inch from your chest.
All along, drafts of the script are shown to police officers and army officers, to check the fictional world against the real one. In Kashmir, Vinod shows the script to a top Intelligence Bureau officer. The officer wonders about the scene where Khan shoots two of the militants right away, during an interrogation. “You’ve just blown him away!” he points out to the filmmakers. “With me, I won’t cut a finger off, because it’s that much less of the body for me to work with. If I cut an arm off, that’s even more lost; if I kill the person, I can’t work with anything.” To the IB officer, the body is a precious resource, to be conserved for its value as a source of pain; every organ, every digit, is valuable.
W
ITHOUT MUCH WARNING
, Amitabh Bacchan backs out of the film. He sends Vinod a fax. Since they have not discussed “many aspects” of the project, the star concludes, “regretfully, I’ll have to give this one a miss.” Vinod scrutinizes the handwritten fax with distaste. “Is this ‘money aspects’ or ‘many aspects’?” He goes to Bacchan’s house with a hundred white roses to persuade the star to sign for his film. The star says he is committed to another movie with himself and Shahrukh in it. We now have to think of the Kashmir film without Bacchan. But there is a dearth of
dignified older actors. Indian male movie stars don’t age gracefully. They grow fat and lose their hair but they still insist on acting opposite heroines in their twenties—as their lovers, not their fathers.
One day Vinod tells me that Shahrukh, too, will not do the Kashmir project. His fees are too high. Vinod is now considering spending the rest of the year making advertising films. The real money is in TV spots. Shahrukh was initially offered thirty lakhs for appearing in Vinod’s film, for which he would have had to travel and work for months. For three days’ work in a Pepsi ad, he’ll get ten times that money. But without the films, Shahrukh’s face in commercials would be unrecognizable. The advertising industry subsidizes the movies by funding the lifestyles of the stars. In return, the movies move product. Product placement in films reaches territories unknown in Hollywood; an entire song might be paid for by Coke, for example, and the hero and heroine dance around giant Coke cans for five to seven minutes of screen time. Nobody minds; there is no division between the sacred and the profane in Indian films.
I finally get a chance to see one of Vinod’s films,
Kareeb
, in a theater in the hill resort of Lonavla.
An Indian cinema hall is never the chamber of mass unconsciousness it is in the West. For one thing, you can never tell anyone to shut up. Everyone talks at will, often keeping up a running dialogue with the characters. If a god appears onscreen, people might throw coins or prostrate themselves in the aisles. Babies howl; during a song, a quarter of the audience might get up and procure refreshment in the lobby. Complex dialogue doesn’t work, because most of the time the audience doesn’t hear it. The sound is so bad in most Indian theaters that, as in a play, there can be no whispering in a Hindi film and the score always has to be played at top volume. It wasn’t always so. To ask directions to the theater in Lonavla, you ask where the “talkies” are.